This weekend was my second year at the Ohio LinuxFest at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, OH. I arrived at the convention center at about 7:15am. Unlike last year, there was hardly anyone there outside of the OLF staff doing checkin and a few vendors. Joe Prostko was already there, having stayed at a hotel nearby the night before. It was good to see him again. We started talked for a bit and then started getting the table set up. I made sure that we had enough supplies for the table and each of us had brought a demo machine. Joe brought an MSI Wind netbook which was running a nightly build and I brought my Dell Latitude D620 running an almost-stock Alpha 2. Both machines proved to be valuable for demoing different aspects of Haiku that day. Soon enough we started seeing some traffic.
Most of the day itself was spent at the Haiku table talking to convention-goers. I even spoke with some people who I recognized from last year. Unlike last year, my laptop only KDLed once. Wanting to see what the sessions that were offered were like, I spent a little time in the Ubuntu on ARM session, which was quite technical but reasonably interesting. It gave me a clue about what to expect if I were going to speak at a session. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to give a session next year on Haiku. Mike Summers had managed to come, albeit later than last year. He rolled in about 3pm, but it was good to see him again. He might've been late, but his presence was felt, becoming the resident "chick magnet." All of us were surprised by that one. ;-)
The people that come to OLF are always really interesting to talk to and, being fellow open source fanatics, quite receptive to Haiku as an operating system. Many of them are intrigued by Haiku's boot times, feature set in combination with its hardware requirements, lack of an X server, and its unique features like queries and the extensive use of attributes. Joe had the Stack and Tile decorator running on his netbook and everyone who saw that were really impressed, myself included. Only those people who were familiar with BeOS or Haiku were not suprised by the number of movies playing simultaneously without dropping frames. My favorite demo was running 3 videos on one workspace, switching to another workspace to start a lengthy project build with Paladin, and switching back to show how responsive Haiku was even with the CPU maxed out. We've got a great OS here.
Some of the main questions that I ended fielding were about stability, where people could try out Haiku, and what Haiku offered in the way of an office suite. It would seem that right now, according to the conference goers, that having OpenOffice.org or KOffice or something is quite important. Perhaps someone might be willing to step up and finish the work on Gobe's Productive suite given this thought.
It was a great conference and I'm looking forward to the next one!
